We know you’ve had to work extra hard to get your blogs off the ground in the last couple of weeks but we think this is paying off. They are looking great!

This week many of you will be working in a group to make a classroom resource or set of materials using some of the tools and software you have explored so far. We’d like you to choose one or two tools and make something you could use in the classroom.

This is a chance to tie your thinking to an area of the curriculum and age group, and to show how you could use technology to enhance children’s learning. Start with your learning objectives and then think about how best to achieve them, evaluating whether technology adds anything. Does it:

• help children achieve something that they couldn’t do any other way?
• enable access to more content or add depth?
• offer alternative ways of exploring content through different media?
• facilitate comments and input from a wider audience or feedback on performance?
• allow for learning to be more personalised and differentiated
• give children increased choice and control over the direction of their work?

Or perhaps it is simply more fun and could act as a hook to engage children with a topic.

Alongside the need to give careful thought to planning is the need to evaluate the impact of ICT on learning. Think about how ICT can help children take some responsibility for their own progress and how it can help you to capture evidence of the learning that is going on in your classroom. 

We’d also like you to think about the process of collaborating together. What works? Did you give yourselves roles? How did you support each other? In your reflection this week also try to comment on how you can encourage children to work well together.

Some of you may be ready to move on this week and explore ways of collecting and interrogating data, manipulating variables and representing findings visually through infographics, graphs and charts. You’ll find some resources to browse for Infographics and Data here.

Finally, here’s a blogpost from Susan Brooks-Young to give you all some ideas:

(Drawings by Frits Ahlefeldt on HikingArtist.com’s photostream licensed under a CC 3.0 Unported License.)